By Paul Gray
The Australian bishops have revealed there are doctrinal difficulties with teachings contained in a book by a retired NSW bishop, Geoffrey Robinson.
The book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, was published last year.
In a statement agreed on during the May plenary meeting, the bishops said that despite correspondence and conversation with Bishop Robinson, “it is clear that doctrinal difficulties remain.”
The major doctrinal difficulty, the bishops say, is Bishop Robinson’s questioning of the authority of the Catholic Church to teach the truth definitively.
“The book’s questioning of the authority of the Church is connected to Bishop Robinson’s uncertainty about the knowledge and authority of Christ Himself,” the bishops state.
“Catholics believe that the Church, founded by Christ, is endowed by Him with a teaching office which endures through time. This is why the Church’s Magisterium teaches the truth authoritatively in the name of Christ.
“The book casts doubt upon these teachings.”
Bishop Robinson retired as auxiliary bishop for Sydney in 2004. He had been made a bishop in 1984.
In that year he also published Marriage, Divorce and Nullity: a Guide to the Annulment Process in the Catholic Church.
He had served on the Sydney archdiocesan Marriage Tribunal. Bishop Robinson played an active role in devising new processes for the prevention of sexual abuse in the Church.
According to the Sydney archdiocese’s website, he has “made an enormous contribution worldwide towards raising the consciousness of Church leaders to their responsibilities in this very difficult and sensitive area.”
Bishop Robinson was also foundation Chair of Encompass Australasia, a program jointly established in 1987 by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes.
He has been awarded an honorary doctorate by Australian Catholic University in recognition of his work in the national Towards Healing process. Towards Healing is a set of principles and procedures for responding to complaints of sexual abuse against Catholic Church personnel.
After publishing his book last year, Bishop Robinson spoke on ABC radio about a memory of having been sexually abused himself as a child.
“It was never a repressed memory,” he told the ABC interviewer Stephen Crittenden. “I always knew it had happened. It had been in the attic of my mind, and it was only when I was talking to victims and the things they said was stirring all these feelings in myself, that I finally took all that down out of the attic, looked at it and actually for the first time named it as sexual abuse, and this was 50 years after it had happened.”
Bishop Robinson said the abuse did not happen at the hands of anyone in the Church. In the interview Bishop Robinson said he retired as a bishop because he could no longer stand up “speaking in the name of the Church which said all those things which I really no longer believed.”
He said: “In the book I’ve queried papal power, papal infallibility, I’ve queried the entire teaching on sex within the Church.”
Before the Bishop came on air, the ABC’s Stephen Crittenden said Bishop Robinson’s book calls for a re-think of all the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage and, Crittenden added, “even a few phrases of the Nicene Creed may have to be altered.”
Last week the Australian bishops expressed gratitude to Bishop Robinson for the contribution he has made to the life of the Church.
“We are deeply indebted to him for his years of effort to bring help and healing to those who have suffered sexual abuse and for what he has done to establish protocols of professional standards for Church personnel in this area.”
The bishops said in responding to the issues raised by the book, they did not question Bishop Robinson’s good faith.
However, they said, people have a right to know clearly what the Catholic Church believes and teaches, and the bishops have a corresponding duty to set this forth.
Because the book casts doubt upon Catholic belief about the teaching office of the Church, other problems follow, the bishops say.
“This leads in turn to the questioning of Catholic teaching on, amongst other things, the nature of Tradition, the inspiration of the Holy Scripture, the infallibility of the Councils and the Pope, the authority of the Creeds, the nature of the ministerial priesthood and central elements of the Church’s moral teaching.”
The bishops’ statement concludes: “The authority entrusted by Christ to his Church may at times be poorly exercised, especially in shaping policy and practice in complex areas of pastoral and human concern.
“This does not in Catholic belief invalidate the Church’s authority to teach particular truths of faith and morals.”